In a general process of butchering a poultry carcass of a fowl such as a chicken into a meat portion and a bone portion, butchering and deboning are performed after feather removal, blood draining, and removal of guts and the like (evisceration). Human labor cannot efficiently perform the butchering-and-deboning processes for poultry carcasses, and thus has been taken over by automated processes. For many years, the present applicant has been engaged in development of the automated deboning technologies for poultry carcasses.
In the course of automated butchering-and-deboning processes of an upper body of a poultry carcass, from which legs and guts are removed to leave only the upper body, the poultry carcass is placed and fixed on a fixing jig of a cone shape, which is referred to as “fixing jig”, to retain an appropriate posture of the poultry carcass through the entire deboning process, as the poultry carcass is carried through a plurality of processing stations to be butchered and deboned.
The butchering-and-deboning processes include a step of separating a breast-meat portion with a wing from a bone section called “gara (waste bone)”. Before separating the breast-meat section, a meat portion is separated from a shoulder blade of a poultry carcass in a shoulder-blade incision-making step.
Patent Document 1 discloses performing a shoulder-blade incision-making step by using a cutting blade mounted to a robot arm of four-axis control.
Furthermore, Patent Document 2 discloses performing a shoulder-blade incision-making step by conveying a poultry carcass fixed to a fixing jig called a carrier along a conveyance path and using a separating member fixed so as to face the conveyance path of the fixing jig.